Cypher Language

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The writers need a new language. But they don't want to actually invent a new language. So they make the "new" language a cipher of English — usually, a substitution cipher — with the same words, grammar and all. Typically, an entirely new 26-letter alphabet is invented, but occasionally "cryptogram"-style ciphers are used, as in Final Fantasy X and Order of the Stick.

Works from non-English-speaking countries may do the same with their own language or alphabet, but not always.

Frequently people make these fonts available for download to use as actual fonts when typing.

See also Wingdinglish and The Backwards Я. When writers take it even further and start creating new lexicons, syntax, and grammar, on into a full-blown original language, you get the supertrope Conlang.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Digicode in Digimon is a cypher of katakana and English. The fourth season only uses three or four symbols, though.

Dog Days has a cypher of katakana. That they use to spell English words.

Haibane Renmei has an ancient alphabet which is basically written sign language. The sign language appears first, and is said to be indecipherable by those not in the know, but Rakka finds a gravestone with a familiar name written on it and recognizes the symbols as hand gestures.

Rave Master has the dead language Symphonian, which substitutes hiragana for characters made up of English letters. For example, the symbol for 'ka' becomes a sideways 'K' with an upside-down 'A' on top of it.

Queen's Blade uses a cypher of English (at least in the sequel QB Rebellion). Subverted, as anyone can easily read those runes if you notice them enough.

In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, the Astral glyph "alien language" on the Numbers cards is a cipher of Japanese katakana, while the Numbers symbols correspond to Arabic numerals/European digits. Likewise, the Varians' writing system is a cipher of the Roman alphabet.

A variant is also seen in the original series, where the text on The Seal of Orichalcos is written in romanized Japanese using the Enochian alphabet.

Starting with Best Wishes, the Pokémon anime started using a cypher language (well, three cypher languages) for background signs and the like. The text generally translates to a mix of romanised japanese and garbled english, though some of it is apparently just gibberish.

Comic Books

Builder Machine Code, an "alien" language in Hickman's run of The Avengers.

Marvel's Doopspeak (the language spoken by the character Doop from X-Statix) was a substitution cipher using the font "Roswell Wreckage".

The Blue Beetle scarab's language was originally represented by a substitution cipher, but eventually transitioned over to English. In a clever move, during the transition, they used an alien-looking font in a style that resembled the substitution cipher, but whose characters could be made out as the Roman alphabet.

The Gelfling language in The Dark Crystal. We only hear a few lines, but it's pretty obvious.

In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it was decided in post-production that it would make sense for a scene set on Vulcan and featuring all-Vulcan characters to feature the Vulcan language. Since the scene was already shot, they just recorded lines that roughly matched the actors' English lip movements. The same process happened to a short exchange between Spock and Saavik in The Wrath of Khan.

Piers Anthony sometimes does this for the language barrier between Xanthians and Mundanes outside Xanth.

The Artemis Fowl series has lines of Gnommish and Centaurian running along the bottom of each page (omitted in some U.S. editions.) Rather than being graphemes of a full-on Conlang they constitute a Cypher Language offering secret messages to those who decode them. Though this is only applicable for the codes along the bottom of the pages—in-universe, Colfer instead makes them completely separate languages.

The writing on the map in The Hobbit is plain English, written with Old Norse runes as a simple substitution cipher. If you already knew the runes it wasn't that much of a cipher. To be fair, he was supposed to have been translating the Red Book in the first place to get The Hobbit. At least, he was by the time he finished Lord of the Rings.

This is stated in the LotR title page. The Cirth at the top read "The Lord of the Rings, translated from the Red Book" while the Tengwar at the bottom continue, "of Westmarch by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Herein is set forth the history of the War of the Ring and the return of the King as seen by the Hobbits."

Most of the people who use tengwar in Real Life are using it in this way, rather than using it to write actual Elvish languages, though the better ones at least make a set of phonetic rules to write English in rather than substituting English spelling.

Tolkien's runes aren't a "simple" substitution cipher. The phonetic rules are necessary because, for example, there's no direct equivalent of the letter X, and the combination TH is represented by a single character (and depends on whether it's voiced (then) or unvoiced (thin)).

Converting the Hebrew characters of "golem language" statements in Making Money reveals that it's in English, although spelled phonetically in part.

In the Sarah Woolson mystery The Cliff House Strangler by Shirley Tallman there is a diary written in what is supposed to be Coptic.

Used for the Thargon language in excellent picture book "Why", by Lindsey Camp, illustrated by TonyRoss.

Live Action TV

The Hebrew alphabet is used for this purpose in the Aussie version of The Amazing Race.

The creators of Stargate made a cypher to function as the Ancient language during production of Stargate Atlantis. It even fed back into the main series, though obviously episodes from before the premiere of Atlantis don't use the actual cypher, but are just "made up as we go" blocky-looking symbols. Stargate Universe uses the cypher, too, drawing most attention to the numbers of the countdown clock. Enterprising viewers have created a font called "Anquietus" and some fans are fluent in written Ancient (which isn't as hard as it sounds; it could easily be learned in a day and mastered in a week).

In Kamen Rider Kuuga, the untranslated language the villainous Grongi speak is a simple substitution cipher of Japanese. The Linto runes themselves feature a stylized form of Katakana (Note: Website is in Japanese). They also added a sentence structure switch that only existed part of the time.

In Kamen Rider Gaim, possibly as a Mythology Gag, the Overlord Inves speak in a foreign language that's, again, a cipher of Japanese. The language was subtitled into Japanese on the show, but the closed captioning track itself included the original cypher, allowing people to figure out the pattern. Unlike in Grongi, the sentence structure remains the same.

Tabletop Games

When Games Workshop released Tau, they used such an alphabet for the Tau's language.

BIONICLE is a borderline case. It claims that the characters are speaking a different language, but it also provides a 26-letter alphabet with stylized, circular or hexagonal letters, and most of the written text in the canon consists of English words written in the BIONICLE Glyphs. Then again, this may still be the Translation Convention at work.

Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X. Happily, the cypher is designed so that the replaced letters can (usually) be pronounced phonetically and still sound like a real language, both in English and in Japanese. It had to be, since there are some voice-acted parts in Al Bhed.

Final Fantasy X also features three written scripts, dubbed Spiran, Yevon, and Al Bhed by fans. They're all English alphabet ciphers.

The Daedric alphabet is a substitution cypher of the standard Latin alphabet, with symbols replacing letters. However, Daedric runes are not arranged like Latin letters - it's quite common to see writing in Daedric written vertically or with runes superimposed over others.

The in-game book "N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis!" is a book written in the language of the slug-like beast-folk Sload. It was written by the infamous Sload Necromancer N'Gasta, and is said to be the preeminent book on necromancy, even centuries after his death. The cypher is of slightly altered Esperanto, of all things.

Melnics in Tales of Eternia looks graphically like angular, runic Sanskrit, but it's a (good) English cipher.

Tales of Innocence R: The Triverse language Kongwai and QQ are using is actually backwards Japanese with slight modification in the spelling, such as when the reversed sentence is supposed to end with consonant. This is noticeable on New Game+, where you can decipher their speech.

The "Standard Galactic Alphabet" in the Commander Keen series simply substitutes symbols for English letters. Episodes 3 and 6 contain translations of the entire alphabet hidden in secret levels (a secret island in episode 3, and a space station in episode 6). The alphabet appears to have been designed to be written with a calligraphy pen, but with slight modifications to a few letters it can be written with a normal pen.

A Metroid Prime 2: Echoes design sheet (viewable in one of the game's bonus galleries) gives a complete set of 26 three-dimensional Luminoth characters and their English alphabet equivalents. They actually work in-game; the Luminoth Lore images are 3-letters that have some relevance to the lore in question. Indeed, the last image in the game's bonus galleries is a very long message in Luminoth script. Eventually, with the exception of one glyph, a French fan managed to fully translate this message, which is a very brief history of Planet Aether: "LIGHT PARADISE / METEOR (unclear) DARK HORDE / ING POSSESS TEMPLE ENERGY / HARSH DIVIDE TWO AETHER".

In Final Fantasy: Unlimited, the native language of Wonderland is a cipher of English. If you want the key, though, you'll have to track down the (out-of-print) artbook.

Precursor/Old Precursor, a substitution cypher from the Jak and Daxter series.

Similarly, the Ultima series employed a number of these (such as Britanic runes, Gargish, and Ophidian), which were mostly substitution cyphers given in the manuals. It used to be that being able to read Britanic runes marked you as a dedicated (retro)gamer, while knowing D'ni marked you as insane. That was years ago, so both are now likely to signify the latter.

The script in Aquaria is a substitution cipher. Lazy players can replace the graphics file holding the glyphs for the Aquarian alphabet with one containing English letters, and have almost all of the text in the game translated, except for a few bits that are painted into the background scenery.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter used a pseudo-Cyrillic alphabet for writing in the game. Not used in game mechanics, but the game creators ended up putting a lot of Easter Egg notes in the game itself as well as official artwork.

La-Mulana has what would otherwise be ordinary Arabic numerals rendered in cipher symbols.

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon uses 'footprint runes'. While there's no actual direct-to-English alphabet translation ever given, it is amusing in that they are the actual footprint images designed for assorted Pokémon.

In Resident Evil (not the remake), the second laboratory password is "Mole" written in the Runic (pre-Latin Germanic) alphabet.

King's Quest VI had the "Ancient Ones' alphabet", a set of pictographic-looking symbols which is just a cipher of English (although they added four conceptual meanings for each symbol for extra depth). This is actually Hand Waved in the Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, whose fictional author speculates that the alphabet may have been a code, or that his own alphabet may have evolved from it. Also functions as a layer of Copy Protection.

Ni no Kuni has the Nazcaän language, similar to the above, but the symbols for I and V double as J, U and W (two V's).

The White Legs from Fallout: New Vegas: Honest Hearts speak a broken/pidgin English cypher.

Copy Kitty: Anything related to Exgal (including its name) is written in the game using a set of creepy looking glyphs. They are just a one-to-one cypher for English letters, and a few fans have decoded it. The Hard Mode Bonus Boss, Aekros, has another cypher language, which is slightly more difficult to decode due to being written backwards.

Dead Space: You see writing in a strange language scrawled on the walls. Practically the first time you see it is also the same time you see a decoder key nearby.

Warframe tried to go full Conlang but ended up settling for highly distinct dialects of English with substitution alphabets. In the developers' words, the GrineerEmpire use "an idiot-proof bar code" while the Corpus use a Roman-Numeral-styled font with "all the individuality and personality of a die-cast metal stamp". The Orokin have the most alien alphabet, resembling fancy calligraphy, with a bunch of extra apostrophes for no reason.

Pikmin 3 has the Koppaite script, seen scrolling various places in the background. It is a cypher for English, and a lot of it is meaningful, including developer's notes here and there. Some of it, however, is just gibberish.

Killzone feartures a Helghan alphabet (although since there is no in-universe Helghan language and the people of Helghast speak standard English, creating the script was probably motivated more by politics than any actual necessity).

Far Cry 4 has shops whose signboards have text which is meant to pass off as either Hindi or a fictional "Kyrati" language. In reality, it is an English cypher, with each English letter replaced by a character from the Devanagari script. This is very different from how English words are normally written in languages that use Devanagari, because it completely butchers the pronunciation.

Web Animation

PONY.MOV: The message written on the bottom of Pinkie Pie's bottle in PARTY.MOV is in the language of apples from Ask Jappleack episode 75: "Apple Language". The F and R characters are interchangeable.

In Harbourmaster, this crosses over with Translation Convention on Page 2 of "Pulp", when Richard Stevenson wakes up and Zefonith tries to converse with him: Zefonith's dialogue is rendered as English written out in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the fact that Richard (a twentieth-century American) can't understand Standard.

An alien language invented for sight gags in Futurama used this, being a straight letter-replacement for English. It would frequently show up as graffiti or on signs that viewers could interpret to get an extra joke. A second alien language (AL2, to obsessed fans) was invented in the second season, using a much more complicated mathematical substitution, because the writing staff are a bunch of massive nerds.

Beast Wars featured separate alphabets for the Maximals and Predacons, both of which were ciphers for English, although their numbers were a little more abstract (the Preds used a take on Roman numerals, but the Maximals go up to 20 before using Roman). They were used to insert a few easter eggs into the series. The downloadable fonts just use our modern 0-9 approach for easier read. Autobot and Decepticon fonts are canon and in use across the various series.

The Cybertronic Optical Code in its written form (in Transformers Animated) is literally a Cypher Language, being compatible with Morse Code but with circles for dots and semi-circles for dashes.

Real Life

The "Maraglyphics" that adorn the wait queue for the Disneyland attraction Indiana Jones Adventure are a simple substitution cipher. The park occasionally distributes cards bearing the translation. Even without, it's pretty easy to decode since the "hieroglyphics" are just heavily stylized English letters.

Community

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